BME press releases

In a study of a broad variety of cancers, published online in Genome Medicine on Aug. 26, an investigative team — including BME Professor Winston Timp, have found widespread and distinctive changes to chemical marks attached to DNA. These Insights could provide a foundation for development of early screening or preventive treatment for cancer.

By finding a way to bind a slippery molecule naturally found in the fluid that surrounds healthy joints, BME’s Jennifer Elisseeff and a team of researchers have engineered surfaces that have the potential to deliver long-lasting lubrication at specific spots throughout the body.

Dr. Jeffrey Siewerdsen and his team of researchers have devised a computerized process that could make minimally invasive surgery more accurate and streamlined using equipment already common in the operating room.

Using a deceptively simple set of experiments, Reza Shadmehr and team have learned why people learn an identical or similar task faster the second, third and subsequent time around. The reason: They are aided not only by memories of how to perform the task, but also by memories of the errors made the first time.

In David Yue’s research lab, a team of researchers have mapped the sound-processing part of the mouse brain in a way that keeps both the proverbial forest and the trees in view. The results represent a step toward better understanding how our own brains process language.

Researchers in Dr. David Yue’s lab at Johns Hopkins have spotted a strong family trait in two distant relatives: the channels that permit entry of sodium and calcium ions into cells turn out to share similar means for regulating ion intake. New evidence is likely to aid development of drugs for channel-linked diseases ranging from epilepsy to heart ailments to muscle weakness.

Jordan Green, PhD, assistant professor of biomedical engineering and neurosurgery at the JHMI reports that nanoparticles were used to deliver a test gene to brain cancer cells in mice which can be used to induce death of the cancerous cells.